They called it a rocket.
It’s like calling the Pietà a “funny rock.” A tiny intergalactic vessel, traveling so close to lightspeed that its contents aged only months–seeking out intelligent life, landing without harming a baby–that’s no rocket. That’s a miracle.
Enfield knows it was the journey, not the destination. That much time at relativity’s edge will change anybody, in ways that have nothing to do with a yellow sun.
Enfield is no genius, no Jor-El. But he’s got the pieces. He’s got to believe. He’s got a chance to make his baby boy a man of tomorrow.
“This was definitely not on the syllabus,” pants Phlange, as they hack their way through steaming vines.
“ECO 302,” calls Professor Ballyforth from his sedan chair. “Practicum in Environmental Issues! Seems straightforward to me.”
“We flew here in a jet,” says Phlange, “and came upriver by a coal-burning barge.”
“Pretty indulgent, eh?” Ballyforth waggles his eyebrows. “Guilt is extra motivation.”
“I already had motivation! That’s why I enrolled!”
“But did everyone? Havis, pop quiz! What is the daily waste footprint of a midwestern American?”
“Yiiii,” Havis replies, providing an Amazon tree boa with sustenance.
“Good!” says Ballyforth. “Six carbon credits.”
“I’m going now, tonight,” Dunyazad says. Her voice is quiet and careful; Cehrazad–twelve to her eleven–is the one crying. “Cehrie, Cehrazad, shhh.”
“I can’t, I can’t live here alone–”
“There are nine children in our wing,” Dunyazad says drily. “And the mothers, and the slaves, and even Father.”
“You know what I mean!”
“You won’t be alone. I’ll be here in your mirror, in your mind, when you need me. Are you ready?”
Cehrazad scrubs her eyes closed. Dunyazad kisses her, and whispers a word in no language, and presses her face to Cehrazad’s fingers; and then she’s gone.
As the building grows, its suite numberings become increasingly arcane. At first it’s just negative numbers for the roots it’s thrusting out from the basement, but soon the ground-floor wings are changing hourly, by the time zones of Boston, Cairo and Beijing. Disgruntled tenants work time-dependent addresses onto their cards. Silk-screened cheap watches are suddenly scarce.
The suites that begin to sprout entirely within other suites are multiples of i; those accessible only by air get quadratic equations. And on the top floor, always the top floor, Gerry watches digits of pi mounting and begins to memorize despair.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Most of Proserpina’s school is empty. The fact is hidden, badly, by the strategic closing of whole halls under “Renovation And Improvement” tarpaulins–no barrier to a girl who charms the maintenance staff. There is no renovation. Public schools are snapping up the private, wing by wing.
She doesn’t have the ring-punch for a proper lace and she’s only seen them in filmstrips anyhow, but Proserpina does manage to sew one tarp into a rough cylinder and stuff it with sawdust and filched oatmeal. She hangs it from a “renovation” scaffold. She strips down to her shift, and squares up.
They’ve come to a beach. The end of the world crouches on her heels.
“Draw a man,” she says.
“I can’t draw,” he says.
“All humans can draw.”
He shivers at her implication and limns a stick figure in the wet sand with his shoe. Sputtering aurorae trace it, green and purple; that startles him, despite everything, and he jumps back.
The end of the world spreads her hand and erases it. “What did that look like?”
“Another dimension,” he says sarcastically, trying to cover.
“Yes,” she murmurs. “Every abstract, every approach to the ideal, is a place where realities overlap.”